From New York to the Rio Grande Valley, across big cities like Miami and San Francisco, in college towns and subdivision-dotted exurbs, the US electorate this year shifted unmistakably rightward.
You can see it if you zoom in on a place like Robeson County, North Carolina, a majority-minority county with the state’s largest Native American population, which swung 9 points toward Donald Trump. You can see it if you zoom out, with the reliably blue state of New Jersey favoring Kamala Harris by just 5 points only four years after President Joe Biden won it in a 16-point rout.
The trend cut across demographic groups, with the heavily Arab American city of Dearborn, Michigan, giving a plurality of its votes to the Republican. Latino men backed Trump by a 12-point margin, according to CNN exit polls – an outcome that would’ve been unimaginable to strategists from both parties as recently as 2012, when the GOP lost the presidency and said in its own autopsy of the contest that non-White voters “think that Republicans do not like them.”
The strength of the right was apparent up and down the ballot, with Republicans taking control of the Senate and appearing on the cusp of holding a narrow majority in the House. While the extent of the carnage is still being tallied, Democrats lost their majorities in the lower houses of the Michigan and Minnesota legislatures.
And the shift was so broad that it left Democrats with hardly any silver linings. After claiming the popular vote in every election since 2008 – and lamenting the Electoral College as a quirky obstacle to what would otherwise be an era of assured political dominance – the party looks poised to lose that, too.
That came despite Democrats outspending Republicans and knocking on millions more doors, and after Harris’ star-studded endorsements and meticulous ground game, which in the end fell short as Trump closed the deal with Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. Ultimately, Harris’ truncated 107-day campaign after Biden’s sudden exit couldn’t shake off voter anxiety over the direction of the country, especially the state of the economy and immigration.
“The Democratic Party just has to come to terms with the fact that we were rejected en masse at the national level by the American electorate,” said Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic pollster.
BORDER COUNTIES
One place that helps illuminate Trump’s decisive victory is Maverick County, Texas. Its shift was bigger than that of any other county in the nation: Trump won it with 59% of the vote – a 28-point swing from four years ago.
The last Republican to win Maverick County was Herbert Hoover in 1928.
Maverick, where nearly 90% of the population speaks Spanish at home, has large numbers of Latino voters. Trump won Latino men outright nationwide, and while Latino women still broke for Harris, the Republican chipped away at her party’s advantage with them.
The map gives hints about the issues that drove the shift. Eight of the 10 US counties with the largest lurch to the right were in Texas – all of them along the Rio Grande River that separates the US from Mexico. Maverick is home to Eagle Pass, a hotspot for border crossings that Trump promised to shut down.
Both campaigns shelled out on ads aimed at Latino voters, with the percentage of presidential election ads running on Spanish-language television and radio stations hitting a record this year.
“These people have always been conservative, they have just never had anyone knocking on their door and saying it’s ok to vote this way,” said Abraham Enriquez, founder of Bienvenido US, a Republican advocacy group that targeted Latino voters in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Texas during the election.
Betty Silva, a New York voter and daughter of Puerto Rican parents, is one voter who put aside personal dislike of Trump and cast her ballot for him. When the Republican was president, she said, “I could afford stuff.”
Trump’s victory this time has shown Republicans that a winning coalition can be built around populist appeals to multi-ethnic, working-class voting blocs – and that his 2016 win was no fluke.
Still, it remains to be seen how enduring Trump’s MAGA movement will be in 2028, when he will be constitutionally barred from a third term. After all, voters already rejected him in 2020 as the pandemic upended the economy.
HARRIS COLLAPSE
The story of the 2024 election is as much about a Harris collapse as it was a Trump surge. With Arizona and Nevada still to be called, but leaning Republican, Trump could get as many as 312 electoral votes if he completes the sweep of all seven battleground states. That’s more than the victor received in the last two elections, but well short of a landslide by historical standards: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all received more.
In states with mostly complete results, Trump improved over his 2020 vote totals in roughly equal proportions in battleground and non-battleground states.
But Harris can’t say the same. As of early Friday morning, she was 84,227 votes behind Biden’s pace in five battleground states – but 2.7 million votes behind in 29 other states with more than 98% of expected vote counted. As Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray noted, her vote totals suffered most in states where Democrats usually win – a sign of flagging enthusiasm from her base.
Arizona voter Jennifer Linzy couldn’t get behind Harris because of the vice president’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war. Linzy, a 39-year-old progressive, left a Phoenix polling station on Tuesday saying she only voted in down-ballot races. “This is the first time I’ve abstained in my entire adult life in a presidential election,” she said.
Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, is on track to have a 20% increase in these presidential “undervotes” this year compared to last time.
Election officials sort ballots ready for tabulation at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center (MCTEC) in Phoenix. Photographer: Dominic Valente/Bloomberg
Of the US counties with more than 98% of the expected vote counted as of 12:00 a.m. Friday, Trump had improved his vote share in 2,380 of them. Harris improved over Biden’s 2020 mark in just 231 of them. Many of those were the Georgia and North Carolina counties hardest hit by September’s Hurricane Helene, suppressing turnout.
In Monroe County, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Pocono Mountains, New York City expatriates have shaded local politics blue for the last two decades. But after a 7-point shift to the right, Trump is winning the county by 900 votes.
Trump’s showing, coupled with Republicans taking control of the Senate and on track to keep the House, will give him a strong hand in negotiating with Congress on taxes, spending, immigration and trade. He’s shown a willingness to use his endorsement to impose party discipline, giving him considerable influence over leadership in Congress.
And he’s already appointed three justices to the Supreme Court in his first term – creating a six to three conservative majority – and with three justices in their 70s, he could have a chance to nominate even more.
“Voters of the United States of America decisively said we are not happy with what we’ve received under the Biden presidency, and we’re ready to go in a different direction,” said Jay Townsend, a bipartisan political consultant.
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